https://www.svots.

edu/content/orthodox-christianity-and-ethics

There are a lot of emotions that we cannot see: Fear, happiness, anxiety. We can
detect these emotions with modern medical equipment. But "soul"? This is an
imaginary thing like Jesus, Virgin Mary, leprechauns. You wrote: "The Orthodox
church is not split over homosexuality, things are clear, it is a sin." At one time in
America, and other white countries, it was very clear that interracial marriage was a
sin--and a crime. As for homosexuality, that was once considered a mental illness,
but in 1973 the American Psychological Association removed it from their list of
mental illnesses. So what is a mental illness? Rep Barney Frank (D-MA) was re-
elected 15 times and retired from the U.S. House. "Frank graduated from Harvard
College and Harvard Law School. Frank was the leading Democrat on the House
Financial Services Committee, and he served as committee chairman when his party
held a House majority from 2007 to 2011."--Wikipedia Now, how can a mentally-ill
person do all these things, and retire a highly respected American citizen? Phyllis
Schlafly was an Orthodox Catholic. Otherwise, I don't know what an Orthodox church
is. It's sad when Abrahamic religions condemn love between men, but have no
problem with men of one side killing men on the other side. "Thou Shalt Not Kill"
except when men lie with men, then it's okay to stone them to death, their blood shall
be upon them--and murder is not a sin except when it is, or isn't. Believing in a
religion causes mental illness. The cure is atheism. Orthodox churches want sinners
to be cured of their sin. This is amusing. So when a Christian converts to Hinduism--
that is, having other gods before him--that would be a sin and the "cure" would be to
convert back to Christianity or Judaism. There are many things that are not taught in
the OT/NT, and human equality is one of them. As to your claim: "Suicide rate among
gay is high in countries they are accepted" Forbes says otherwise: "When gay and
lesbian couples have the right to marry one another, teens in that state are less likely
to attempt suicide, found an analysis of data collected consistently over 17 years
from 47 states. While this relationship might seem odd initially, the findings make
sense in light of the fact that the biggest drops in suicide attempts occurred among
LGBTQ adolescents."
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1. There is no evidence for God’s existence.

There are a couple of problems with this line. Starting with the idea of ‘evidence,’ what
exactly does one mean by evidence? What is sufficient evidence for one person is often
not sufficient evidence for another. A court of law provides innumerable examples of how
two parties can possess the same collection of data, the same power of logic and
reasoning, yet argue for completely different interpretations of the data. The old saying is
true: the facts do not determine the argument, the argument determines the facts.

When confronted with the charge that there is no evidence for God the Christian often
does not know where to start with a rebuttal. It’s as G.K. Chesterton once said, asking a
Christian to prove God’s existence is like asking someone to prove the existence of
civilization. What is one to do but point and say, “look, there’s a chair, and there’s a
building,” etc. How can one prove civilization by merely selecting a piece here and a piece
there as sufficient proofs rather than having an experience of civilization as a whole?
Nearly everything the Christian lays eyes on is proof of God’s existence because he sees
the ‘handiwork’ of God all around him in creation. But this is hardly sufficient evidence in
the court of atheist opinion, a court which presupposes that only what can be
apprehended by the senses rightly qualifies as evidence. For the Christian who believes in
a transcendent God, he can offer no such evidence; to produce material evidence for God
is, ironically, to disprove a transcendent God and cast out faith.

The second part of the line is equally short-sighted. What does one mean by ‘existence’?
If one means, ‘that which has come into existence,’ then surely God does not exist
because God never came into existence. He always was; He is eternal. This was a famous
assessment of the matter by Soren Kierkegaard (dealing with the incarnation of Christ).
The argument is a bit involved, so for times sakes I’ll just have to state it and leave it
there.

2. If God created the universe, who created God?

This is one of the more peculiar arguments I’ve ever come across. Those who use this
charge as some sort of intellectual checkmate have simply failed to grasp what Christians
understand as ‘eternal.’ It is an argument usually levied once a theist posits that a ‘first
cause’ or an ‘unmoved mover’ is required for the existence of the universe (a ‘necessary’
Being upon which all other things exist by way of contingency). Some atheists then shift
the weight over to the theist saying, “Well then who created God?” What is a Christian to
do but smile at such a question? God is the antecedent of all things in creation and is
eternal. If God had a Creator then His Creator would be God. God is God precisely
because He does not have a creator.

3. God is not all-powerful if there is something He cannot do. God cannot lie,
therefore God is not all-powerful.

Bang! Owned.

Not so fast. This argument would be fantastic—devastating maybe—if God was more of
the ancient Greek god persuasion, where the gods themselves were subject to fate and
limited to their specific roles in the cosmos. The Orthodox doctrine of God is much
different. Christians (at least Orthodox Christians) view God’s ontology as subject to His
perfect free-will. Why is He good? Because He wills to be good. Why does He not lie?
Because He wills to be honest. Why does God exist as Trinity? Because He wills it. He
could just as easily will to not exist. And yes, He could just as easily will to lie. The fact
that He doesn’t is no commentary on whether He could.

(Note: Due to the immense amount of discussion that this point has raised, one clarifying
statement is worth noting. An argument based on strict logical word games can render
the idea ‘all-powerful,’ or ‘omnipotent’ self-defeating. When one considers the juvenile
question, “Can God create a rock so big that He can’t lift it?” this point becomes clear. But
in reality, such an argument winds up further solidifying what Christianity means by
calling God all-powerful. For the Christian it simply means that all power and authority
are God’s. Following the logical word game above forces the believer to make a redundant
proclamation in order to remain consistent: “God cannot overpower Himself.” But this
fact is anything but confounding, it merely stresses the point that there is no power
greater than God, so much so that one is forced to pit God against Himself in order to
find His equal.)

4. Believing in God is the same as believing in the Tooth Fairy, Santa Clause,
and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
What I love about this well-worn atheist ‘argument’ is that it actually serves to
demonstrate how vastly different a belief in God is to these myths and imaginations.
When one honestly assesses the Judeo-Christian doctrine of God he will find multiple
thousands of years of human testimony and religious development; he will find martyrs
enduring the most horrific trauma in defense of the faith; he will find accounts in
religious texts with historical and geographical corroboration; etc (these fact are of
course not ‘proofs,’ but rather ‘evidences’ that elicit strong consideration). Pit this against
tales of the Tooth Fairy, Santa, and Spaghetti Monsters and one finds the exact opposite:
no testimony or religious refinement, no martyrs, no historical and geographical
corroboration, etc. Instead, one finds myths created intentionally for children, for point
making, or for whatever. It’s strawman argumentation at its worst.

5. Christianity arose from an ancient and ignorant people who didn’t have
science.

Indeed, those ancient, ignorant people who believed in the virgin birth of Christ must
have believed it because they did not possess the knowledge of how babies were born.
Goodness. The virgin birth of Christ was profound and of paramount concern to the
ancients precisely because they understood that conception was impossible without
intercourse. Ancient man considered the virgin birth miraculous, i.e., impossible without
divine action (and at the time most people scorned the idea), and the same could be said
with every miraculous story in Scripture.

Indeed ancient people did not have the Hubble telescope, but they were able to see the
night sky in full array, something almost no modern person can claim (thanks to modern
lighting which distorts our ability to see the full night sky). On average, ancient people
lived much closer to nature and to the realities of life and death than many of us
moderners.

In terms of a living relationship with these things the ancients were far more advanced
than we are today, and this relationship is essentially the nature of religious inquiry. If
people lack religious speculation today, maybe it is because they spend more time with
their iphones and Macs then with nature. Maybe.

But the claim that Christianity was viable in the ancient world because it was endorsed by
wide spread ignorance is a profoundly ignorant idea. Christianity arose in one of the most
highly advanced civilizations in human history. The Roman Empire was not known for its
stupidity. It was the epicenter of innovation and philosophical giants. I would wager that
if a common person of today found himself in a philosophical debate with a common
person of first century Alexandria, the moderner would be utterly humiliated in the
exchange.

6. Christian’s only believe in Christianity because they were born in a

Christian culture. If they’d been born in India they would have been Hindu
instead.

This argument is appealing because it pretends to wholly dismiss people’s reasoning

capabilities based on their environmental influences in childhood. The idea is that people
in general are so intellectually near-sighted that they can’t see past their own upbringing,
which, it would follow, would be an equally condemning commentary on atheism. But,
this is a spurious claim.

Take the history of the Jewish people for example. Let us say that to ‘be’ Jewish, in the
religious sense, is much more than a matter of cultural adherence. To be a Jewish
believer is to have Judaism permeate one’s thinking and believing and interaction with
the world. But is this the state of affairs with the majority of the Jewish people, whether
in America, Europe, Israel, or wherever? One would have to be seriously out of touch to
believe so. The same phenomenon is found within so-called Christian communities.
Indeed, being born in a Jewish or Christian centric home today is more often a precursor
that the child will grow up to abandon the faith of his or her family.

7. The gospel doesn’t make sense: God was mad at mankind because of sin so
he decided to torture and kill his own Son so that he could appease his own
pathological anger. God is the weirdo, not me.

This is actually a really good argument against certain Protestant sects (I’ve used it
myself on numerous occasions), but it has no traction with the Orthodox Christian faith.
The Orthodox have no concept of a God who needed appeasement in order to love His
creation. The Father sacrificed His own Son in order to destroy death with His life; not to
assuage His wrath, but to heal; not to protect mankind from His fury, but to unite
mankind to His love. If the reader is interested to hear more on this topic follow
this link for a fuller discussion.

8. History is full of mother-child messiah cults, trinity godheads, and the

like. Thus the Christian story is a myth like the rest.

This argument seems insurmountable on the surface, but is really a slow-pitch across the
plate (if you don’t mind a baseball analogy). There is no arguing the fact that history is
full of similar stories found in the Bible, and I won’t take the time to recount them here.
But this fact should not be surprising in the least, indeed if history had no similar stories
it would be reason for concern. Anything beautiful always has replicas. A counterfeit coin
does not prove the non-existence of the authentic coin, it proves the exact opposite. A
thousand U2 cover bands is not evidence that U2 is a myth.

Ah, but that doesn’t address the fact that some of these stories were told before the
Biblical accounts. True. But imagine if the only story of a messianic virgin birth, death,
and resurrection were contained in the New Testament. That, to me, would be odd. It
would be odd because if all people everywhere had God as their Creator, yet the central
event of human history—the game changing event of all the ages—the incarnation, death,
and resurrection of Christ had never occurred to them, in at least some hazy form, they
would have been completely cut off from the prime mysteries of human existence. It
seems only natural that if the advent of Christ was real it would permeate through the
consciousness of mankind on some level regardless of their place in history. One should
expect to find mankind replicating these stories, found in their own visions and dreams,
again and again throughout history. And indeed, that is what we find.

9. The God of the Bible is evil. A God who allows so much suffering and death
can be nothing but evil.

This criticism is voice in many different ways. For me, this is one of the most legitimate
arguments against the existence of a good God. The fact that there is suffering and death
is the strongest argument against the belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving
God. If suffering and death exist it seems to suggest one of two things: (1) either God is
love, but He is not all-powerful and cannot stop suffering and death, or (2) God is all-
powerful, but He does not care for us.

I devoted a separate article addressing this problem, but let me deal here with the
problem inherent in the criticism itself. The argument takes as its presupposition that
good and evil are real; that there is an ultimate standard of good and evil that supersedes
mere fanciful ‘ideas’ about what is good and evil at a given time in our ethical evolution,
as it were. If there is not a real existence—an ontological reality—of good and evil, then
the charge that God is evil because of this or that is really to say nothing more than, “I
personally don’t like what I see in the world and therefore a good God cannot exist.” I like
what C.S. Lewis said on a similar matter: “There is no sense in talking of ‘becoming
better’ if better means simply ‘what we are becoming’—it is like congratulating yourself
on reaching your destination and defining destination as ‘the place you have reached.’”

What is tricky for the atheist in these sorts of debates is to steer clear of words loaded
with religious overtones. It’s weird for someone who does not believe in ultimate good
and evil to condemn God as evil because He did not achieve their personal vision of good.
So, the initial criticism is sound, but it is subversive to the atheist’s staging ground. If one
is going to accept good and evil as realities, he is not in a position to fully reject God.
Instead, he is more in a position to wrestle with the idea that God is good. This struggle is
applauded in the Orthodox Church. After all, the very word God used for his people in the
Old Testament—“Israel”—means to struggle with God.

10. Evolution has answered the question of where we came from. There is no
need for ignorant ancient myths anymore.

This might be the most popular attempted smack-downs of religion in general today. It is
found in many variations but the concept is fairly consistent and goes something like
this: Science has brought us to a point where we no longer need mythology to understand
the world, and any questions which remain will eventually be answered through future
scientific breakthroughs. The main battle-ground where this criticism is seen today is in
evolution vs. creationism debates.

Let me say upfront that there is perhaps no other subject that bores me more than
evolution vs. creationism debates. I would rather watch paint dry. And when I’m not
falling asleep through such debates I’m frustrated because usually both sides of the
debate use large amounts of dishonesty in order to gain points rather than to gain the
truth. The evolutionist has no commentary whatsoever on the existence of God, and the
creationist usually suffers from profound confusion in their understanding of the first few
chapters of Genesis.

So, without entering into the most pathetic debate of the ages, bereft of all intellectual
profundity, I’ll only comment on the underlining idea that science has put Christianity
out of the answer business. Science is fantastic if you want to know what gauge wire is
compatible with a 20 amp electric charge, how agriculture works, what causes disease
and how to cure it, and a million other things. But where the physical sciences are
completely lacking is in those issues most important to human beings—the truly
existential issues: what does it mean to be human, why are we here, what is valuable,
what does it mean to love, to hate, what am I to do with guilt, grief, sorrow, what does it
mean to succeed, is there any meaning and what does ‘meaning’ mean, and, of course, is
there a God? etc, ad infinitum.

As far as where we come from, evolution has barely scratched the purely scientific surface
of the matter. Even if the whole project of evolution as an account of our history was
without serious objection, it would still not answer the problem of the origin of life, since
the option of natural selection as an explanation is not available when considering how
dead or inorganic matter becomes organic. Even more complicated is the matter of where
matter came from. The ‘Big Bang’ is not an answer to origins but rather a description of
the event by which everything came into being; i.e., it’s the description of a smoking gun,
not the shooter.

That’s it… my top 10 list. Thanks for reading. Cheers.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/biocentrism/201112/does-the-soul-exist-
evidence-says-yes
https://theconversation.com/whatever-the-soul-is-its-existence-cant-be-proved-or-
disproved-by-natural-science-61244

One of the Ten Commandments says, Thou shalt not kill, but the problem is that the word in
question clearly means murder, rather than killing in the context of war, or of an execution.